I went through the same exercise recently, and came to a different conclusion. I’m blown away, and I can see how this is the future, and it’s a good thing. Whi

I went through the same exercise recently, and came to a different conclusion. I’m blown away, and I can see how this is the future, and it’s a good thing. While I agree the current state of affairs isn’t great, we have to look past today to where things are going. As far as I can tell tools like Midjourney do enable an iterative creative process. It’s more like painting with a pinball machine than directly with brushes. You have control over the process but only very tenuously. Things can go very wrong with generation that are out of your control, but the control you do have is magical. I used Midjourney to try and generate a character for a project. I started with a source image and a description, and through hours of refining and regeneration, I finally got a character I liked. - Did I steal the character from someone else? No, the character as far as I can tell is a unique one that I arrived at after sifting through thousands of variations. - Did I copy a style? Well no it really, I made a character. I can then apply any style I want to it. The style is orthogonal to my goals of character generation. - Did I get the result through no work of my own? Well I certainly lack the skill to draw the image I landed on. The only technical skill I used was clicking a button and entering text. But that’s the best part! Anyone can do this! The skill I was actually using was my mind’s eye in guiding the iterative prompts, choosing when to blend images, choosing the words and the seed images, etc. That’s a higher-level creative process than moving the brush in the canvas. And you know who will be best at this? Artists! The way I see it, this is a case of the punch card writer being replaced by the compiler. The punch card writer has all the skills necessary to use the compiler to continue producing programs as they were before, but faster. Yes, artists are threatened by this. But they shouldn’t be because they are the most qualified to leverage these tools and to wield them competently. The game used to be to start from a blank canvas and to use an iterative creative process to build a scene that you picture in your head. Nothing has changed about that except now the canvas starts filled. But it still needs to be molded and pushed toward what’s in the kind of the artist. That’s where the artistry comes in.